Not So Much, Said the Cat

by Michael Swanwick

  Unexpectedly, Su-yin felt a twinge of regret for the freedoms she would be losing when she returned home.

  She stood. “Let’s go outside. I need some fresh air. Less stale air, I mean.”

  Out on the street, they wandered aimlessly down crumbling sidewalks and past shuttered buildings ugly with graffiti. Half the streetlights were out. When Rico tried to put his arm around her waist, Su-yin moved away from him. She didn’t think so small a gesture would do any harm. But this late in the game she wasn’t taking any chances.

  They came to the waterfront and stopped. There, by the oily black waters of the Acheron, Rico found a discarded shopping cart, which they turned on its side and used for a bench. “I’ll miss you,” he said. “But it was kind of a miracle you were here in the first place, wasn’t it? You don’t feel the miseries or see the abominations the rest of us do. Just being in your presence I can imagine a little bit what it must be like to be you. Glorious.”

  Su-yin didn’t feel the least bit glorious. But she refrained from saying so. She leaned lightly against Rico, cherishing his solidity, hoping the warmth of her body would provide him some small comfort. “Let’s not talk about that. Tell me something else instead.”

  “Okay.” After a brief silence, Rico said, “I grew up in Baltimore. People think that big cities are divorced from nature but that’s not true. There are butterflies in the spring and in autumn the trees turn bright gold and red. Sometimes in the winter it snows so hard that all the traffic stops. The streets are covered in sheets of purest white and the silence . . . the silence is . . . I can’t do this.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t do this to you. I’m sorry.”

  Rico stood and turned away from Su-yin, drawing her up in his wake. Carefully, she said, “What are you talking about?”

  “The Devil came to see me today.”

  “Oh,” Su-yin said.

  “I’d never seen her before. But she walks in the door and you know who she is, don’t you? She told me that if I could score with you tonight, she’d let me out of this place. You can’t imagine how it felt, hearing that. She said that we’d leave the club and wind up here. That I should talk about my childhood, crap like that. That the words would just come to me. But this is not what I want. Well, I do want it. But not like this.”

  Rico looked so forlorn that Su-yin started to take him into her arms to comfort him. He was such a sweet boy, she thought, such an innocent. It came to her in that moment that she had a choice. She could free her father from Hell or she could free Rico. Either way, she’d feel guilty about leaving one of them behind. Either way, it would be an epic accomplishment. And if she were to choose Rico. . . .

  “You prick! You bastard!” Su-yin pushed Rico away from her and then punched him in the chest as hard as she could. “This is part of the script, isn’t it?” All her emotions were in a jumble. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to barf. “Well, you can just go—”

  “Daughter.”

  Su-yin whirled, and there was the General, looming over her like a thunderhead. Her heart soared at the sight of him, even as she took an involuntary step back from his frown. She wanted to hug him, but even when he was alive that was an impertinence he would not allow in such a mood.

  “Take a good long look at yourself, young lady. Out unescorted, at night, with this hooligan. Using bad language. Dressed like a prostitute. Living in . . . this place. Is this the life you imagine I had planned for you?”

  “I—”

  “I left you well provided for. Then I came here to be punished for doing things I should not have done. This is not only the way things are, it is the way they should be.” The General wavered in Su-yin’s sight like a candle flame, her eyes were so full of tears. “Do not speak! I am going to tell you what to do and you are to obey me without question. Do you understand?”

  “I . . . yes.”

  “I have experience being in positions where there are no good choices. All you can do is negotiate the best deal you can. Have sex with this inappropriate young man. Then go home and never do anything shameful like that again. Many good women have such incidents in their past. Even your mother did things she later regretted.” The General turned to Rico. “You.”

  “Sir?

  “Give my daughter your hand.”

  He did so.

  “Go into the nearest apartment building. The lobby will be clean and the doorman will give you the key to a decent room. There you will do what you must. There will be a condom on the nightstand—use it. Afterward, my daughter will lead you out of Hell. You can show your gratitude by never trying to see her again.”

  Rico nodded assent and turned to go.

  But when he did, Su-yin did not follow. Pulling her hand free of his, she said to her father, “How do you know all this? About the room, the condom, the nightstand?”

  “Don’t ask foolish questions. Just do as you’re told.”

  An icy rage surged up within Su-yin. “You’re in league with the Devil, both of you. Maybe Rico doesn’t know it, but you certainly do. Good cop, bad cop. One of you weak, the other harsh.” When her father’s face went hard as granite, he looked like a gaunt version of Frankenstein’s monster. How could she not have seen this before? “After all I’ve gone through for you!”

  Rico reached out pleadingly toward Su-yin. But the General shoved him aside. Then, unthinkably, he raised up a hand to slap her.

  Su-yin screamed and flinched away. Before the slap could land, she kicked off her heels and ran. Barefoot, she sped down the street, away from the both of them, as fast as she could go.

  Four moves ahead, she thought wildly. Don’t let yourself be drawn off guard. The hell with Rico and, for that matter, the hell with her father too. She wasn’t going to be fooled as easily as that.

  Back at the penthouse, Leonid was waiting. “Well?” he said anxiously.

  All the way up in the elevator, Su-yin had been a bundle of hysteria and misery, equally mixed. Now, however. . . .

  In trembling disbelief, she said, “I passed the test.”

  They broke out the Cristal and, laughing, drank down glass after glass. Leonid put on some music and they stumblingly danced the tango. Then they collided with the couch and tumbled down atop it and somehow they were kissing. Clothing got pushed this way and that way and then Leonid had his hands under her dress and she was fumbling with his zipper. It was wrong and she knew it, she’d never even thought of Leonid in that way, and yet somehow she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  They did it right there on the couch.

  It wasn’t that great.

  When they were done, Leonid gathered up his scattered clothes, dressed, and said, “It’s almost midnight. I suggest you be out of Hell by morning.”

  Shocked, Su-yin said, “You . . . That was planned! All year you pretended to be my friend, when you knew from the start that you were going to . . . going to . . . do that.”

  “Believe it or not, I did you a huge favor,” Leonid said. “The Devil would never have let you win. If you had held out against me, she would have arranged for you to be very brutally gang-raped. The only reason that didn’t happen as soon as you cut a deal with her was that she wanted to teach you a lesson. Let’s be honest here: You never had a chance. The Devil likes to play games. But all her games are rigged.”

  He adjusted his cravat, bowed, and left.

  Su-yin had been told to leave Hell and she would. But she hadn’t been told how to go about it. So she went to see Rico.

  His face brightened when he saw her in the doorway of his sad little apartment, then dimmed again when she told him the reason she had come. “Any direction you take will lead you away from here,” he said. There was a hurt look in the back of his eyes, but he said nothing of what he must have been thinking. “You could just walk out.”

  “Like heck I could. I lost the challenge. I lost my father. I lost a year of my life. I am not going to spend a single minute more than I have to in this place.
I want to be out of here just as fast as I can manage.”

  “I lost all that too,” Rico mumbled, “and more.”

  Su-yin pretended she hadn’t heard him. “What did you say?”

  “I said yeah, I can help you.”

  On a shadowy street just off the clubbing sector, Su-yin stopped in front of a Lincoln Continental. She liked how it looked. Also, she wanted something big. “This one,” she said. It took Rico only seconds to break into the Lincoln and hot-wire the ignition. “How about that?” he said. “I guess the old skills never go away.”

  “Open up the trunk for me, would you? I have something I want to put in the back,” Su-yin said. When he had done so, she bent briefly inside. “Oh, no!” she cried. “I dropped my brooch, the one my mother left me when she died, and I can’t reach it. Rico, you’re tall. . . .”

  Rico leaned far into the trunk, groping in its dark recesses. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s way in the back. It bounced there.” Su-yin waited until Rico was stretched as far he could go and grabbed his ankles. With all her strength, she lifted him off the ground and toppled him over into the trunk. Then she slammed it shut.

  A muffled voice said, “Hey!”

  Su-yin climbed into the front of the car. As she did, a black streak of fur leaped over her and into the passenger seat. “You’re not leaving without me,” Beelzebub said.

  “Of course not.” Su-yin put the car into gear and started slowly down the road, ignoring the hammering from the trunk. “When we get home, I’m going to wash you and brush you and take a flea comb to your fur, though. Then I’ll buy you a pint of cream.”

  “Make it a quart of scotch and you got a deal.”

  Su-yin shifted gears into second and then third. She sideswiped a parked Volkswagen van and, tires screeching, accidentally ran a red light. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic hereabouts at this time of night.

  “Whoah!” Beelzebub cried. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re the absolute worst driver in the universe?”

  “You’re the first.” They were coming to the city limits now. Beyond lay what Su-yin was pretty sure was the Meadowlands. As they crossed into New Jersey, she floored the accelerator, sending two oncoming cars veering off the road to avoid collision. Then she pulled the Lincoln back into its lane and they were barreling down the road, a full moon bouncing in the sky overhead, only slightly out of control. She noted with satisfaction that Rico was still shouting at her from the trunk. Apparently, hot-wiring the car had been just enough to bring his karma into the positive digits. “I’m not doing too badly, though. Considering.”

  She had lost her father and she didn’t think the pain of that would ever go away, not totally. But at least she had a boyfriend now. She wasn’t quite sure just what one did with one, other than going dancing and having sex. But she’d find out soon enough, she supposed.

  Su-yin rolled down the window to let the wonderful stink of marshes and rotting garbage into the car, reveling in the hot summer night, the way the wind batted her hair about, and the neon lights of Hell fading slowly behind her in the rearview mirror.

  THE WOMAN WHO SHOOK THE WORLD-TREE

  She was not a pretty child. Nor did her appearance improve with age. “You’d better get yourself a good education,” her mother would say, laughing. “Because you’re sure not going to get by on your looks.” Perhaps for this reason, perhaps not, her father demonstrated no discernible fondness for her. So, from a very early age, Mariella Coudy channeled all her energies inward, into the life of the mind.

  It took some time for first her parents and then the doctors and psychiatrists they hired to realize that her dark moods, long silences, blank stares, and sudden non sequiturs were symptomatic not of a mental disorder but of her extreme brilliance. At age seven she invented what was only recognized three years later as her own, admittedly rudimentary, version of calculus. “I wanted to know how to calculate the volume defined by an irregular curve,” she said when a startled mathematician from the local university deciphered her symbols, “and nobody would tell me.” A tutor brought her swiftly up to postgraduate level and then was peremptorily dismissed by the child as no longer having anything to teach her. At age eleven, after thinking long and hard about what would happen if two black holes collided, she submitted a handwritten page of equations to Applied Physics Letters, prompting a very long phone call from its editor.

  Not long thereafter, when she was still months shy of twelve years old, some very respectful people from Stanford offered her a full scholarship, room and board, and full-time supervision by a woman who made a living mentoring precocious young women. By that time, her parents were only too happy to be free of her undeniably spooky presence.

  At Stanford, she made no friends but otherwise thrived. By age sixteen she had a PhD in physics. By age eighteen she had two more— one in mathematics and the other in applied deterministics, a discipline of her own devising. The Institute for Advanced Study offered her a fellowship, which she accepted and which was periodically renewed.

  Twelve years went by without her doing anything of any particular note.

  Then one day, immediately after she had given a poorly received talk titled “A Preliminary Refutation of the Chronon,” a handsome young man fresh out of grad school came to her office and said, “Dr. Coudy, my name is Richard Zhang and I want to work with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I heard what you had to say today and I believe that your theories are going to change the way we think about everything.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, why should I let you work with me?”

  The young man grinned with the cocky assurance of a prized and pampered wunderkind and said, “I’m the only one who actually heard what you were saying. You were speaking to one of the smartest, most open-minded audiences in the world, and they rejected your conclusions out of hand. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You need a bench man who can devise a convincing experiment and settle the matter once and for all. I may not be able to generate your insights but I can follow them. I’m a wizard with lab equipment. And I’m persistent.”

  Mariella Coudy doubted that last statement very much. In her experience, nobody had a fraction of the persistence she herself possessed. She’d once heard it said that few people had the patience to look at a painting for the length of time it took to eat an apple, and she knew for a fact that almost nobody could think about even the most complex equation for more than three days straight without growing weary of it.

  She silently studied Zhang for as long as it would take to eat an apple. At first he tipped his head slightly, smiling in puzzlement. But then he realized that it was some sort of test and grew very still. Occasionally he blinked. But otherwise he did nothing.

  Finally, Mariella said, “How do you propose to test my ideas?”

  “Well, first. . . .” Richard Zhang talked for a very long time.

  “That won’t work,” she said when he was done. “But it’s on the right track.”

  It took a year to devise the experiment, debug it, and make it work. Almost fourteen months of marathon discussions of physics and math, chalkboard duels, and passionate excursions up side issues that ultimately led nowhere, punctuated by experiments that failed heartbreakingly and then, on examination, proved in one way or another to be fundamentally flawed in their conception. Occasionally, during that time, Richard gave brief talks on their work and, because he met all questions with courteous elucidation and never once replied to an objection with a derisive snort, a blast of laughter, or a long, angry stare, a sense began to spread across the campus that Dr. Coudy might actually be on to something. The first talk drew four auditors. The last filled a lecture hall.

  Finally, there came the night when Richard clamped a 500-milliwatt laser onto the steel top of a laser table with vibration-suppressing legs, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay, I think we’re ready. Goggles on?”

  Mariella slid her p
rotective goggles down over her eyes.

  Richard aimed a 532-nanometer beam of green laser light through a beam splitter and into a mated pair of Pockels cells. The light emerging from one went directly to the target, a white sheet of paper taped to the wall. The light from the other disappeared through a slit in the kludge of apparatus at the far side of the table. Where it emerged, Richard had set up a small mirror to bounce it to the target alongside the first green circle. He adjusted the mirror’s tweaking screws, so that the two circles overlapped, creating an interference pattern.

  Then he flipped the manual control on one of the cells, changing the applied voltage and rotating the plane of polarization of the beam. The interference pattern disappeared.

  He flipped the control back. The interference pattern was restored.

  Finally, Richard slaved the two Pockels cells to a randomizer, which would periodically vary the voltage each received—but, because it had only the one output, always the same to both and at the exact same time. He turned it on. The purpose of the randomizer was to entirely remove human volition from the process.

  “Got anything memorable to say for the history books?” Richard asked.

  Mariella shook her head. “Just run it.”

  He turned on the mechanism. Nothing hummed or made grinding noises. Reality did not distort. There was a decided lack of lightning.

  They waited.

  The randomizer went click. One of the overlapping circles on the target disappeared. The other remained.

  And then the first one reappeared. Two superimposed circles creating a single interference pattern.